Absent

I've been absent from this space for several months now. There are a multitude of reasons, some of them conflicting. Sometimes I've been too busy. Other times, my absence had more to do with being distracted. Still other times, my reason for not posting is just because I've been unfocused and lacked the energy. This morning I got up and out of the house later than usual, largely because I felt emotionally lethargic; hopeless; wanting to not have to live this life anymore. I felt as if there was no meaningful reason to get up and continue this awful slog. I wanted not to have to get up again at all. As of 2:00 p.m. I still feel that way.


I saw my grandbaby Vaughn this past weekend. His mom and dad brought him for a visit. They stayed at a hotel instead of my house; the house my daughter and son grew up in. There are so many reasons this fact hurts so much. All of them are emblematic of my failure as a mother; my failure to make a place my children would want to come back to. In my mind In my mind, this mirrors the uselessness of my failed life. I am 57 years old. Past the point of assuming things will change for the better beyond the next bend in the road. I'm arriving at the conclusion, and this is pretty much it; the sum total of things; how my life has turned out. And I don't want this life. I feel like I imagine I'd feel with a painful, terminal illness. If this is as good as it's going to get, I prefer not to do it anymore.


I am so in love with my grand child. He is purely, deeply beautiful. But I believe he'll be just fine without me. I don't do him justice with such a morose, distracted split mind. He deserves more than the splintered bits of my soul that remain alive. And today, it just doesn't feel as if there's anything I'll ever be able to do about that. And the most awful thing is I'm sure there are bad things still coming.

"Trouble in the air. I don't want it. But I've got to breath. It's

coming through the door,

behind the shadows that surround me when I sleep."

The saving grace is that it's all down hill from here. I believe I've reached the zenith of how bad living can be. Instantaneously eviscerated while standing. The rest is just falling. That's exactly what I'm doing now. I'm falling down. Once that happens, I suspect I won't want to get up. And the strange thing is, at this very moment, that probability doesn't matter to me one bit.